Through the Extremist Lens
is seen time and again in legal proceedings . Dylann Roof ’ s killing of nine African-American worshippers at a church in Charleston County , South Carolina , is labeled a hate crime , despite the perpetrator having left a 2000-word manifesto claiming he wanted to start a race war and stating during an interview : “ I had to do it because somebody had to do something … Black people are killing white people every day on the street , and they are raping white women . What I did is so minuscule to what they ’ re doing to white people every day all the time ” ( Norris , 2017 ; Corbin , 2017 ). Akayed Ullah , who is a non-white Muslim by comparison , was labeled a terrorist despite having killed only himself during a subway bus terminal bombing in New York ( Norris , 2017 ).
This hesitancy to label white Christian violence as terrorism is endemic of a deeper , societal racism in which recognition or even mention of the problem is taboo , ( DiAngelo , 2006 , 2011 ). From a white perspective , whiteness is sensed as a kind of unbiased , universal baseline , devoid of a unique cultural perspective and instead representative of objective reality ( McIntosh , 1988 , DiAngelo , 2011 ). White people are never “ white people ,” merely “ people ,” and thus their experiences are representative of everyone ’ s experiences ; they are never members of a racialized group but merely individuals , completely separated from the racist implications of history or from the actions of other members of their racial group ( DiAngelo , 2010 ). From that perspective , racism and privilege may be recognized as problems , but they are never “ our problem ,” only the unfortunate results of actions taken by other “ bad white people ” and thus outside of “ our ” sphere of control or concern ( DiAngelo , 2010 ). On the other hand , people of color are never conceptualized as merely “ people ,” they are inextricable from their racial context and inherently separate from the white experience ( DiAngelo , 2011 ). This separation results in the concept of a deracialized ( white ) environment representing not a societal loss but a societal gain ( Johnson & Shapiro , 2003 ). This lends itself to a racialized interpretation of coded language for “ good schools ” or “ good neighborhoods ” to mean “ white schools ” or “ white neighborhoods ” ( Johnson & Shapiro , 2003 ). These deracialized “ white spaces ” are reflections of white people ’ s self-conceptions as inherently deracialized individuals , conceptions so deeply held that any challenge to that viewpoint whether overt or implied threatens to shatter the veil of a deracialized existence , resulting in feelings of deep discomfort often remedied by a series of socially sanctioned counter measures to distance oneself from the source of the discomfort ( Di- Angelo , 2011 ). Vodde ( 2001 ) describes it succinctly : “ If privilege is defined as a legitimization of one ’ s entitlement to resources , it can also be defined as permission to escape or avoid any challenges to this entitlement .”
Beyond a strictly racial sense , most Americans are shielded from familiarity with their own complicity in supporting foreign and economic policies which have driven the creation of the very terrorist threats that now plague the public conscience , aided by
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